James R. Mirick sets the record straight on things he cares about

Another Look at Terrorism

Start out by remembering that “terrorism” is really just a tactic that various groups use to achieve their ends, it’s not a unifying political or social philosophy. Groups don’t just decide to become terrorists, they employ terrorism because it works to further their cause. There are other possible tactics; the PLO for most of it’s existence built it’s political base by running schools and opening health-care facilities in the occupied territories when the Israelis refused to do so. But if “terrorism” is a particularly barbaric set of tactics that we wish to discourage in the name of humanity, then we need to understand who is doing it and why.

I’ve posted several times regarding the problem with the Bush Administration’s simple-minded “us vs. the world” approach to dealing with terrorists, and argued that we need a more nuanced and localized analysis framework to understanding them, uncovering their motivations, and devising suitable strategies to combating them. Just click on the “terrorism” category to the right to read these earlier posts.

I just ran across a very clear and analytical viewpoint of terrorist types in an original article in Newsvine, by someone who writes under the name “Belarius,” and I wholeheartedly recommend it to you (I recommend Newsvine to you in general, but that’s another story).

For the purposes of his article, Belarius lumps various terrorist or terrorist-support organizations into these groups:

Nationalist revolutionaries (the IRA, Hamas, and Basque separatists)

International ideologues (al Qaeda)

International mercenaries (Blackwater, and other “contractors” we employ in Iraq)

Criminal organizations (mainly traffickers in drugs and women)

Black-market weapons dealers

Governmental organizations

The agendas of these groups sometimes are in alignment and sometimes diverge, and at the least are ever-shifting. Given all this, it’s no wonder that we are being unsuccessful in combating them with infantry and heavy weapons! And certainly the Bush Administration’s constant drumbeat against a single, unified “International Terrorist Organization” accomplishes nothing useful at all.